There are infinite ways to create a checkerboard and I do so both with my programming as well as in games like Minecraft.

Here is my gigantic 32x32x32 checkerboard in Minecraft made with heavy use of commands. It would be possible to build it in survival mode as well although it will take me much longer.

I also continue my Binary Bit Map project as I find time. Here a few samples I’ve posted previously on this blog of what I can do.

Tonight I found a genius way to do star polygons by drawing several smaller triangles to a temporary image, using the scan fill function, and then bitwise ORing them to the destination image. This gives me the filled in pentagrams and hexagrams exactly the same as they would look when I create them in inkscape but also allows for the gif animations I uploaded to my social…

The following is a story I wrote years ago. My friend Poffo finished the story with a happy ending.

(Original by Chastity)

Once upon a time, there was a garden full of trees,grass and flowers. Every kind of plant and animal lived there. The plants grew every day because sunlight,water,and dirt were never hard to find. One day all of that changed. Humans came and built a city. They cut down the trees,shot the animals and killed all of them that didn’t run away fast enough. The humans also built roads over much of the grass and flowers. There was still a lot of beauty to be seen there for some time but it was nothing like before. The flowers were still there and wished they could do something before they were destroyed too. However, the flowers could not speak the language of the humans nor could they run away like the animals. They knew it would only be a matter of time before the humans would continue their destruction. The humans didn’t call it destruction. They called it construction, progress, growth, prosperity, improvement and any other word that meant the complete opposite of what they were doing. They built houses,stores,restaurants,and churches. Every time they built something new, they cut down anything that they thought was in their way. This included more trees,flowers and grass. There were many things on wheels which the humans called “cars”. They would roll and move on the roads and parking lots the humans had built. They air soon became polluted and stinky with the smell of gasoline. Even the flowers which had still survived died off slowly without any clean air or water. However, one of the flowers spread it’s seeds one day. It’s seeds were special because each had a white parachute that carried it as far as the wind could take it. Most of them blew away for many miles. The mother flower hoped that they could find a place to land that was safe where they could grow and enjoy clean water,air,and sunlight.

The following is the story of what happened to one of those seeds. It landed in the back yard behind a house. The seed didn’t know where it landed or what it was supposed to do. However, there is only one thing a seed knows how to do. It sent a root into the ground under it and slowly dug its way deeper and deeper every day. It was eating and drinking whatever it could find. Eventually, the seed was no longer seed. It had not only grown downward but also up toward the sun. By this time, it could be seen from the surface. It was what humans call a dandelion. It was a yellow flower that looked almost exactly like the sun. This flower didn’t know that it was called a dandelion nor could it see itself. It just did what flowers do. It enjoyed the light and heat of the sun and grew stronger every time the sun was out or the rain fell.

The humans who lived in that house weren’t in the back yard much but every so often, a man would come with a noisy machine. He would push it and it cut down grass and everything in it’s path. It cut the dandelion also. The yellow flower was beheaded every time this happened. However, it was never completely gone because its roots and some of the stem were never harmed from what happened on the surface. It grew back in only a short time and was a flower enjoying the sunlight again.

But the man with the lawnmower came out every week and cut everything. The dandelion was confused. Why was there sun,rain,and dirt to help it grow. It seemed useless since clearly nobody wanted it to be there. It was tired of being cut and didn’t know when it would happen next. There were also earthworms in the dirt. The tunnels they dug gave the roots of the dandelion more room to grow. Overtime the dandelion became jealous of the worms. They could travel in the dirt and go where they wanted but the dandelion had to stay where it was. It could not walk like a human or wiggle like a worm. It sometimes wished that it could be a worm and stay down in the dirt where it was safe from humans.

There were other strange things the dandelion didn’t understand. The family who lived in the house as well as the neighbors would complain that the sun was too hot or that they didn’t want it to rain. They stayed in their house most of the time and didn’t like any of the things that helped the dandelion grow. None of it made sense. What were these creatures? Why did they want to kill it and the grass? How did they live without water,sunlight,dirt or worms?

That was the viewpoint of the dandelion. What it didn’t know was that the humans were going to work,school,church, and places to have fun. They left their house every day from the front door which the dandelion had never seen.

When the winter came, the sun was often hidden behind clouds and instead of rain, cold white stuff came down and covered the dandelion and all the grass around it. No longer could the dandelion see or hear what was happening on the surface. It could feel only its roots in the dirt. At least part of it was safe. For awhile, it enjoyed this time because the man with the mower wasn’t there to cut it. It felt like one of the worms because it was completely under the dirt and snow. It felt safe there for awhile but eventually missed the sun and wanted to grow as a flower again. It tried not to think about it because it didn’t know if the sun existed anymore or if the snow would ever go away.

Eventually, spring came and the snow was melted away by the sun. The dandelion quickly grew and felt the sun again after such a long time. But, it didn’t know how long this would last. How long would it be before someone came to cut it? How would it know when the sun might hide or when the snow would cover it?

(ending by Poffo)

Then one day, someone kind and wise noticed the dandelion and asking permission from the people in the house, began to gather it up with others of its kind in the yard and put it in a basket with a hundred other dandelions just like it.

They were all scared and nervous and traumatized being cut away from their roots, but they were reassured by a wise old dandelion in the bunch that was older and much larger than all the rest, who told them that other parts of themselves would still live on and grow again because their roots were strong and their essence carried on, even without their “flowering head.” So they all settled down and relaxed and accepted their fate and faced the future without fear.

The basket was carried far away to a warm and cozy house where it was then emptied into a bowl and crushed and boiled and used to make medicine for other humans who were sick. The dandelion felt no pain and became one with the Universe. And even though it was no more, in its final moments it at last understood that its purpose was to help and to heal others.

I’m working on a new image format. I’m pretty sure the layout of the format is final. It has all the features of my BBM format but uses a new header which allows for comments because the 4 bytes at address 0x0C are the pointer to the pixel data. This means literally anything could be between the header and the data. In this example a small comment of the name of the format: “Binary Pixel Map”. These screenshots show the equivalent PBM file and the checkerboard that it looks like.

The goal of this format is to be able to eventually support any type of image whether monochrome, grayscale, or full color RGB. The code needs work but if I made a good conversion tool people would see why my format is superior to several others with the exception of compression because I don’t know how that works yet, but…

In the original post, George said: “With all these dumb “abortion isn’t vegan” posts lately, I figured some of you pro-birthers could use a friendly reminder of the kinds of people who agree with you on that issue. And who doesn’t love Westboro Baptist Church, right? Amongst all these signs displaying insanely homophobic and racist rhetoric, you’ll find one at the bottom right that decries abortion. It’s been circled for your convenience. So much compassion in one picture! Because as you all love to say, “You can’t be a compassionate vegan unless you’re pro-life,” right?Well if the congregation at Westboro Baptist are your kind of people, then please carry on.”

I want to criticize this ridiculous post George Chapman wrote. His argument was basically that pro-life people are bad because they happen to agree with the Westboro Baptist Church on one thing, that abortion is bloody murder.

6 bytes for the 2 colors in the palette. Each taking 3 bytes for Red, Green, and Blue.

That’s a total of 32 bytes. I love the BMP format but it has a lot of junk data in the header that is reserved or tells how many bytes are in the file.

But my biggest criticism of the format is the fact that the width of each row must be a multiple of 4. This means hundreds of extra bytes for no good reason.

PBM files only have a few extra bits at the end of the row if the image width is not a multiple of 8 but that’s only because computers operate on 8 bits at a time.

PBM was the first official format that I learned to write with only code from the C standard library. In fact a few printf and looped fputc calls on a file opened in binary writing mode is really all you need. The details of that format are here.

Both the Windows BMP and the NetPBM PBM format are perfectly capable of storing ANY image containing only black and white. They can also pack each pixel into a single bit!

But here is where they differ.

BMP files can have a color palette so that the two colors can be whichever two colors the author chooses.

PBM can be black and white only

BMP requires padding at the end of each row of pixels to be a multiple of 4 bytes.

PBM doesn’t have to have that extra padding and the files will typically be hundreds of bytes smaller.

BMP files have binary headers for the information about the bitmap and how it will be displayed.

PBM files have a plain text header that can be viewed even in Notepad! Yet they still are smaller than the space wasting headers of BMP.

I have decided currently that my format will be called:

BBM: Binary Bit Map

Sort of redundant I know but it was to emphasize that it’s a format for two colors. I reject the gender binary but not the binary numeral system! Also there will be no plain text unlike PBM has.

But the specific details of how the information will be stored has a few things that I’ll need to decide on.

1. Do I have the width and height be 4 bytes each for a total of 8 bytes of a header? That would allow up to 4294967295*4294967295 size images.

Or do I use only two bytes for each which allows a maximum image of 65535*65535? That’s probably bigger than any image that websites allow uploading. A single image would be close to 4 GB!

2. Do I include a color palette like BMP has or should it be strictly black and white for tradition?

3. How will I deal with the extra unused bits when the total number of pixels is not a multiple of 8? Should I use the same routine as for pbm where the end of the row is padded to be a full byte. Or should I use an even more clever method like only padding to a full byte at the end of the entire image? I think there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.

XBM is worth mentioning because although it is a text format and takes a lot of space, it is a monochrome format which stores 1 bit per pixel. My own format will be so much like it that converting it to an XBM would be trivial.